Ok, so let me keep this straight and clear. I looked everywhere on the forums and wasn't able to find a thread about game retention metrics, which I believe is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing for a game developer, so let's talk about it in this one. I don't have answers, only questions, as I believe many of you do too. Let's try to find the answers together, or, if anyone knows, I would appreciate the advice. Let me start by asking some very obvious ones. (By the way please let me know if there is another thread discussing game retention in this forum so I can delete this one, the last thing I want is to flood the forums with useless and repetitive threads) Here we go. 1. What are some good retention metrics? Like Day 1/7/30 numbers, for our minimal styled games? 2. How can we increase those numbers? Do push notifications work? Daily rewards? (has someone tried this and what were the results?) And how big is the impact of those few things? 3. From those of you that had successful games (with publishers), can you reveal your retention metrics to us? (If you can't I totally understand) 4. How "big" do the retention numbers need to be to know if our games are worth being promoted? 5. What is the retention number that if your game doesn't reach, then you know it's not worth it so you can move to a new game? Those are just some questions that I CONSTANTLY have in my mind, and many more will come up later. But for a group of developers, I believe that this subject needs to be discussed and everyone needs to have clear answers. Please feel free to answer/ ask/ enrich this thread in any way possible! And yeah, I get that the numbers are not gonna be exact and sharp, since every game is different, but the games we make with buildbox belong more or less in the same genre, which means that we should be able to have some general numbers in our heads!
In a video I believe Trey talked about how Ketchapp used to use push notification but no longer does it because people find em annoying... I believe a big piece of this is on how the game is played and whether each game is like a new game or somehow a continuation of a previous game. Best example I can think is Ballz, the game is great and if you're good enough you won't die in one sitting and then you reload it later to continue where you left off. This is how I think of retention outside of metrics, because while metrics is invaluable... you have to have em first.
Im not 100% sure, but i remember awhile back while i was talking with publisher, Voodo retention got brought up. Day 1 was like 60% needed when they do testing. They are confident in being able to raise the later numbers 7,30 etc. if the day 1 is strong enough. under 60% D1 retention and its going to be tough. But most of us indie devs, would be happy with 40-50% retention on a self published games, as long as we are driving good downloads. I've made a decent amount of money over the years, with terrible retention games, and made no money on some of the best retentioned games. that came down to amount of Downloads.
I completely agree with you, as far as publishers are concerned, there is a strong reason for not accepting the games with retention below 50% D1 and below atleast 18% D7, the formula is simple, they fund heavily and they need to share the revenue for 50% so they can’t accept anything at Lower retention and that’s the reason Voodoo prefers CPI less than 20 cents. If they had to release their own title, even 40-45% is good to go for them because there will be no sharing, a clear profit. So I still believe boxers, we at indie stage, if our games gets around 40% D1, it’s a good performing ratio with no , even if D7 reaches 12% who cares, as far as the downloads are organic and no money involved in promotion, couple of our games has more than 45% D1, infact one reaches 56% S1 but the D7 was poor so unfortunately the deal wasn’t carried forward
Both your input is nice and appreciated. Lets say I have a game which has 45% day 1 retention. How can I promote it in order to make money? What is the desired CPI and how can I achieve it? Also one other question. What I dont understand is if you have a game that makes you money, why dont you just spend thousands on it? I mean, no game gets organic downloads without promotion, so obviously you spent money to do so and since you say you are making money, the game makes the money back. So why not spend EVERY last penny you have on that game, since you know you will make profit?
Hi mate, if you have a game that has 45% D1, your desired CPI should be around 20 cents just go for it, if you have a good budget. There is no specific methodology to attain low CPI, but yes tweaking cool graphics or really engaging gameplay can make it possible, one our game had CPI of 0.06 targeting US campaign but again D7 was not so impressive so the publisher wasn’t ready. I am sure you have seen Rise up game floating in chart for months, it’s hard to believe that rise up can be D1 - 55%, but it was their in charts but the indie dev himself promoted to the strong extent, no limit Most important if you have a good budget I would suggest your target campaign should only be US. That’s the only region that can result into good ROI. If you target other regions, you will make money but not so impressive business Your goal to succeed, keep in mind : 1) Low CPI 2) High retention ( With publisher? Expect D1-D7 to be 50-20, without publisher? Even D1-D7 as 45-15 should be good to go) Just target to have around 20k users only from US per day with low CPI, if you get it, just push it higher, 1 install = 0.2 cents (US) 20k installs = $4k Invest atleast $4k per day to enter top 200 in US charts at the standard CPI of 0.2, if it’s lesser, it’s more beneficial Our game had 0.08, in order to reach top chart 200 in US it was needed to invest $1600 per day to enter US charts Secondary, as I said the game had good retention, but unfortunately I don’t have enough budget to promote it or good UA skills, it takes a good amount of investment to promote if one wants to promote it at the next level, a budget of 1-2k won’t matter as we have already tried in past, so better to focus on good ASO as our games still gets average downloads based on ASO.
@bmsingha thanks for your input, i want to let you know that I will be experimenting with facebook and instagram ads and I will let you know of my CPI and revenue, if I manage to make any money! Thank you man
@Snow Great, would really love to know how you take up, yes for sure FB and insta are great way to promote, if not, I will also suggest you to try through museers and see how it goes, even museers are engaging the audience this days, all you need to do is get in touch with some famous museers like for eg: Kristen, pay her an X amount and rest leave everything on her, this is just an idea, not knowing about results
